Being A Bit More Optimistic: Personally, I'm going to eventually pick up a Wii U. I already have a PC and the only other exclusives I have a slight interest in (besides what Nintendo offers) are Sony's games, and then there are only a few.

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The current thinking is that they won't due to then move away from the Cell Processor. Its also one of the reasons they bought Gaikai, since their is a chance there won't be any BC on the PS4 they can have it through cloud gaming, Either through a one time fee per game or an a la carte sub inside of PS+.

As for me its probably

First to Release?

They probably will be releasing close to each other so its not that big of a factor for me.

Price?

I'm guessing they will be in the $399 ball park with maybe a $499 awesome model.

Exclusive Games?

Something I will be looking closely at. Still won't be sure until E3 probably. I know its rumored that Durango will have Alan Wake 2 a new PGR at launch as well as maybe Black Tusk's game. Sony I'm expecting to have a new wipe out and maybe something from sucker punch.

Graphics Performance?

Both will be in the same ball park. Which ever one being more powerful doesn't really matter as only first party developers will take advantage of (see PS3)

Services?

A big factor for me. Will be looking at who has the better overall box instead of something that just plays games.

The Current Gen Investments you've made?

Invested in XBLA and Xbox Video. BC of that will probably sway me to go Durango.

Brand Loyalty?

Going to admit that I'm a bit of a Microsoft Stan at times.

Controller Preference?

Fix the damn d-pad

Backwards Compatibilty?

Yes even if its half assed emulation like the 360 and Wii U BC.

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Games that I want. Since Halo 5 will come out for Microsoft's system, and me, my brother and dad love the series, then I'll probably end up getting Microsoft's system at the time of that game's release.

Now, when it comes to Sony, it really depends on the Japanese games that made me like the PS3. Since most of Sony's properties don't really appeal to me that much (I only seem to like Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper, and Resistance) it'll be about those games in the land of the raising sun.

Now, new IPs are likely to show with every new generation, so my purchases will also depend on that.

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I expect the PS4 will win. The PS3 slaughtered everyone in that genre this gen.

I think that might depend on how costly it would be to develop for. If the Wii U is significantly cheaper, I could see more games winding up on the Wii U. Course, I suppose if they're gonna go cheaper, they'd go for portables, but who these days really has the kind of money for a big budget RPG besides Square-Enix? Even Atlus doesn't develop RPGs for home consoles these days.

each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache

each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources

each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:

custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor

12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads

each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle

at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:

8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)

32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)

from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.

Hard drive is always present

50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:

Gigabit Ethernet

Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:

Move engines

Image, video, and audio codecs

Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware

Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

Orbis

Both the next generation PlayStation - and its Xbox competitor - feature eight-core CPUs clocked at 1.6GHz according to sources trusted by Digital Foundry. The main processor architecture driving both consoles is said to be derived the new "Jaguar" technology currently in development by Intel's arch-rival, AMD. These are low-power processor cores designed for the entry-level laptop and tablet market, offering an excellent ratio between power consumption and performance. The PC Jaguar products are set to ship later this year in a quad-core configuration - next-gen consoles see the core count double with some customisations added to the overall design.

Married to the eight-core processor, Orbis also features Radeon HD graphics hardware. We've previously suggested that AMD's mobile "Pitcairn" design - the Radeon 7970M - could be a strong basis for a next-gen console graphics core in terms of power consumption and die-size. Running at 850MHz and featuring 20 of AMD's "Graphics Core Next" compute units, our information suggests that Orbis shaves off 10 per cent of that number, offering up 18 CUs in total, and sees a mild downclock to 800MHz. Incorporated into a design dedicated to cutting-edge visuals and gameplay, this hardware has some serious potential.

It is perhaps more than coincidence that these specs offer up the 1.84 teraflops metric for the Orbis GPU that was mooted yesterday, assuming that the figure is calculated in the same way that it is for AMD's current "Graphics Core Next" range of products. At this time we cannot confirm the make-up of the Durango graphics hardware - rumours have circulated for quite some time that it is some way behind Orbis, but equally there has been the suggestion that the GPU itself is supplemented by additional task-specific hardware. We could not confirm this, but an ex-Microsoft staffer with a prior relationship with the Xbox team says that two of these modules are graphics-related.

PlayStation Orbis: Spec highlights

Distilled down to the fundamentals, these are the details we can share about the technological make-up of the next generation PlayStation.
•CPU: Eight-core AMD processor running at 1.6GHz
•Graphics core: Radeon HD hardware, 18 compute units at 800MHz
•Additional hardware: GPU-like Compute module, some resources reserved by the OS
•System-on-chip codename: Liverpool
•Memory: 4GB GDDR5, 512MB reserved by the OS

The Radeon 7970M laptop GPU appears to be a pretty close match for the processing tech inside the next-gen PlayStation - there's a small reduction in clock speed and the amount of compute units, but otherwise it's very close. Here's what this tech can achieve in pure PC terms with Crysis 2 performance compared at the very high and extreme graphical presets. Freed from Windows and incorporated into a fixed console design, this GPU will really have room to show us what it's truly capable of.

However, there's a fair amount of "secret sauce" in Orbis and we can disclose details on one of the more interesting additions. Paired up with the eight AMD cores, we find a bespoke GPU-like "Compute" module, designed to ease the burden on certain operations - physics calculations are a good example of traditional CPU work that are often hived off to GPU cores. We're assured that this is bespoke hardware that is not a part of the main graphics pipeline but we remain rather mystified by its standalone inclusion, bearing in mind Compute functions could be run off the main graphics cores and that devs could have the option to utilise that power for additional graphical grunt, if they so chose.

Previous rumours have suggested that Orbis runs its CPU cores along with some graphics hardware inside a standalone, custom AMD Fusion core with a separate, discrete GPU. Our sources suggest otherwise - all of these elements are embedded into the same piece of silicon, and we can confirm that the internal codename for the processor is indeed "Liverpool", as was mooted some time ago. Sony does have some form here for pushing the envelope - PlayStation Vita represents the only mobile GPU processor that combined quad-core ARM Cortex A9s with the PowerVR SGX543 MP4. Even on the power-hungry iPad 3, Apple stuck with dual-core CPU architecture at the same 45nm fabrication node.

The news that so much processing power is packed onto a single processor is highly significant to the point where credibility could be stretched somewhat. However, helping to explain matters is the make-up of AMD's Jaguar tech - each core occupies just 3.1mm2 of die-space at the 28nm fabrication standard. Factor in L2 cache, and the overall CPU component could be as little as 75-80mm2 in total. That's in contrast to the 235mm2 of the launch PS3's Cell processor and the 240mm2 of the Emotion Engine chip inside the original PlayStation 2 - neither of which factored in the separate graphics hardware, which in both cases was even larger. By our reckoning, the more efficient eight-core set-up still leaves plenty of space for integrating the main GPU onto the same die, with space to spare. This offers up significant production cost savings and brings down overall power consumption.

"Orbis has a singular focus on delivering high-end performance without breaking the bank - our take on the specs is that this is a machine built to last with a huge amount of potential."

Here's what a mobile Intel quad-core with Radeon 7970M can achieve on Battlefield 3 - superb performance at 1080p on medium settings and still highly impressive on the high preset. This is the kind of ballpark processing performance we expect to see on next-gen consoles, but bear in mind this is couched in PC terms. In a dedicated gaming box, we should expect much better once developers get to grips with the hardware.

Bearing in mind that the 7970M draws just 75W and that Orbis cuts out a couple of compute units in combination with a drop of around six per cent reduction in clock speed, we can easily envisage the unit drawing no more than 150W from the mains overall once we factor in RAM, CPU and storage power draw. This compares favourably to consumption that sailed perilously close to 200W on the original versions of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and should reduce the dangers of another RROD/YLOD debacle.

We also have hard data on Orbis's memory set-up. It features 4GB of GDDR5 - the ultra-fast RAM that typically ships with the latest PC graphics cards - with 512MB reserved for the operating system. This is in stark contrast to the much slower DDR3 that Durango will almost certainly ship with. Microsoft looks set to be using an offshoot of eDRAM technology connected to the graphics core to offset the bandwidth issues the use of DDR3 incurs. Volume of RAM is the key element in Durango's favour - there'll be 8GB in total, with a significant amount (two sources we've spoken to suggest 3GB in total) reserved for the OS.

There'll be a relatively high CPU overhead too, with potentially two cores reserved for the customisable apps Microsoft wants to run in parallel with gameplay. Orbis has no such ambitions and may power past the new Xbox simply because it focuses its resources on out-and-out games power. There's always the possibility that Microsoft has looked at the prior success of Nintendo and its own Kinect and come to the conclusion that chasing after the maximum in raw horsepower isn't the way to win the next console war.

"The next-gen Xbox refines DirectX 11 for a fixed hardware gaming platform while Orbis sees a revised version of the LibGCM API used on PlayStation 3 and PS Vita."

While Durango continues to hoard many of its secrets, we now have a very good idea of the basic architectural outline of the next-gen PlayStation. So the question is, what sort of performance ballpark are we talking about here? In our Radeon 7970M review, we ran Battlefield 3 on medium settings, and Crysis 2 likewise on its very high preset - both at the magical 1080p60. With some frame-rate drops we could ramp that up to high and extreme respectively for a perfectly playable, visually arresting experience. In our tests the Radeon GPU ran in concert with a 2.3GHz Intel quad-core CPU; bearing in mind the firm's domination over AMD in single-thread performance, not to mention the Turbo Boost technology that automatically overclocks the CPU to thermal limits, we reckon this is a fairly good ballpark comparison to an eight-core AMD CPU (primarily aimed at entry level markets, remember) running at a relatively low clock speed.

Of course, these ballpark tests are not the be-all-and-end-all of next-gen power - let's not forget that the new consoles are dedicated games machines gifted with a host of advantages over PC hardware. Factor out the overhead of the Windows OS, introduce ever-evolving development tools written for a fixed platform, and consider the performance advantages of a dedicated design - particularly the fast interconnects between CPU, GPU and RAM. What we have here is hardware that easily punches above its weight compared to performance couched purely in PC terms. It's a state of affairs borne out by both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3: by 2007, PC hardware had already moved significantly beyond the raw horsepower offered by current-gen consoles, yet games like God of War 3, Halo 4 and Uncharted 3 have extracted visual performance that could only have been dreamed of back then. Based on what we know about the next-gen consoles, there's little reason why history can't repeat itself.

That said, the AMD connection that defines both Durango and Orbis confirms that both consoles are much closer in design to gaming PCs than their predecessors, which may result in stronger ports to the computer format, not to mention the upcoming Steam Box - a piece of hardware free to evolve and grow more powerful year upon year in a way that Sony and Microsoft's boxes can't. And surely Valve must be looking at these specs with perhaps a little relief - AMD's CPU architecture is designed with power efficiency in mind, and in pure performance terms, even an eight-core set-up should be comfortably out-performed by a fast, modern desktop Intel quad-core processor. In developing and optimising next-gen titles for the lower power console CPUs, it would be richly ironic if PC owners reaped the benefits...

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I'm probably gonna get my first non-Nintendo console this Gen, as I'm almost able to earn money.
Waiting on how the SteamBox turns out, but I'll probably get a PS4 if it does as well game-wise as the PS3 did. Though I'd guess most of my friends would get the NeXtBox, but I dunno, they seem perfectly content with their 360s.

Could that be a problem BTW? People being content enough with the still decent flow of PS360 titles that the next gen systems could stutter?
Looking at the transition from PS2 to PS3, it may slow sales in the beginning... but I doubt it'll do much damage long-term. But then again what do I know.

No. If you look at the Calander we don't know any thing that's coming out for Q3-Q4 for this year. A lot of speculation is because a lot of the games hitting in the fall will be Durango/Orbis titles or cross generation games.

As far as sales go I think that this generation has gone on long enough and while hardware sales for the 360/PS3 have been quite strong considering its been eight years since the debut of the 360. However software sales have slowed down quite a bit due to the fatigue of this generation lasting so long and no new IP as much.

Also Microsoft at least is rumored to have a subscription plan and advertising the Durango as an Entertainment system than a game console.

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As strange as it sounds, backwards compatibility and the ability to download classic games is a big selling point to me. The VC was the biggest reason I bought a Wii, and I love downloading PS1 and PS2 classics on the PS3. If Nintendo can get the Wii U's VC situation sorted out I might lean towards buying one, but so far the Wii U all around has not impressed me. I'm gonna play wait and see with PS4 and the new XBox before I get a new system. Besides, I am playing catch up now on all the PS3 games I missed out on in the past few years.